Obama fell flat

Obama himself struck a defensive note even as he began speaking, seeming to acknowledge his own disdain for the 2012 campaign.

“Trivial things become big distractions,” the president said. “Serious issues become sound bites. The truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising. And if you’re sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me, so am I.”

Yet Obama then went about reprising some of the same attacks that have become background noise on TV sets in swing states across the country.

He mocked Romney for gaffes, insulting the Brits before their Olympics, and went about touching the various Democratic constituencies — gays, abortion-rights supporters, Hispanics — in the same fashion his party had all week in Charlotte.

It was a long ways from Obama’s original convention speech in which he attempted to bridge division, not stoke differences for his own gain.

To sympathetic Democrats, the Obama speech was a reflection of the reality of the campaign: a tough, even scorched-earth approach marks the only path to victory.

“He’s got to win,” responded former Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis when asked on his way out of Charlotte why Obama seems resigned to playing by rules he purports to disdain. “He’s got to win this thing and then he’s going to come back to [Republicans] and say,’ I won, we got four years so let’s be constructive.”

A senior Obama official, when posed with the same question, said much the same when speaking without attribution.

“How would a speech like the one you claim to want help him win the election?” asked the official. “Think about what we need to do to win, motivate our supporters and communicate to swing voters the choice between competing visions for the economy. The speech was designed to meet those goals and did so incredibly effectively.”

Two Democrats with close ties to the Obama campaign, who were familiar with the thinking that went into the address, said the goal was essentially to bring Obama back to earth in terms of how he’s viewed by voters. The Democrats said the campaign believed Obama would get hit hard if he looked to score rhetorical points and so the president instead went more for pragmatism. The campaign is feeling, despite the criticisms, pretty good about the outcome, said the Democrats.

The sources argued that it was wrong to compare the speech to a keynote address and to historic speeches in 2008, noting that the Thursday night address has never been a benchmark that Chicago has pointed to as an inflection point, as opposed to Mitt Romney’s convention speech, which Republicans had focused on for months as an opportunity for the GOP nominee.

Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.) on Friday called it an “appropriate” speech for the moment and said Obama was “very clear about his accomplishments, major challenges and the contrast” with the GOP. “He ended on a very high note,” she added.